Category: Garden trends & design

Have you thought about how your garden micro-climate affects how well your plants grow? For example, you might wonder why some plants aren’t flowering. Or perhaps others are getting scorched leaves, even if the same plants seem to do well in your neighbour’s garden. The key is to understand  – or create – different ‘climates’ within your…

Edimentals is a new term for growing flowers and vegetables together. Gardens today are often too small to have a separate ‘veg patch.’ Of course, traditional vegetable growing won’t fit into your herbaceous border. If you plant a row of carrots beside your roses, you’ll have a gap when you harvest them. So this means looking…

A rose garden used to mean a garden planted only with roses. It was superbly romantic, but the wow factor only lasted a few weeks. Today’s rose gardens combine roses with other plants. They have all the show-stopping colour and scent of a rose garden, but they weave in perennials, shrubs and trees. So the garden looks…

Are you looking for garden ideas for a difficult part of your garden? Perhaps you’ve changed the way you use the space or something needs replacing, such as a dead tree or a rotting shed? Or you’d just like more wow factor as you step out the back door or look out of the window? Garden designers…

Garden border maintenance in both autumn and spring is mainly about the plants. Summer and early autumn is for dead-heading. Weeding goes on all year round if you have a mild climate. Watering is for dry spells. But in both autumn and spring, it’s time to plant new plants, move plants that are in the wrong place and divide…

Do you want to support wildlife in your garden – but you don’t want a ‘wild’ looking garden? You’d like beautiful borders and gorgeous pots? Even, perhaps, a short neat lawn? The gardening world is getting more polarised between the re-wilders and those who want their outdoor space to look like traditional gardens. But at Great Dixter, one…

Kathy and Stuart Pickering created their rustic cottage garden in a stretch of field. And you can use the same techniques to turn an empty lawn into a haven of colour and scent, filled with butterflies and birdsong. Their space is equivalent to a long, narrow town garden, measuring around 30ft x 100ft, but the ideas would…

I’m always being asked for ideas for breaking up the space in a shallow wide garden, and also how to make it look longer. Many houses today are being built on small, individual plots. Gardens are getting smaller and they’re often shallow or odd wedge-shapes. Garden designer Posy Gentles transformed this shallow wide garden in Whitstable…

A stumpery is an area of the garden with tree stumps and logs arranged as decoration. If you’ve got a mature tree with big roots and you can’t plant anything near it, then a stumpery is an interesting and attractive option. It’s sometimes described as ‘a rock garden created with tree stumps.’ Perfect for a shady slope or corner,…

If you want to transform your garden on a budget, then Jo and Simon Rutherford have some brilliant tips and ideas to copy. When they moved into their home a few years ago, the garden was a patch of bare lawn running up to the fence line. There was a concrete flagstone path from the back door…